Donald Trump has spent nearly two years investigating, suing, or prosecuting anybody in politics, media, or government who ever defied him. Now, with Democrats poised to win control of one or both chambers of Congress, the administration and its allies are prepared to slip back into their familiar pose of victimhood.

The putative evidence of imminent GOP persecution comes from Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, who recently told the Vox journalist Astead Herndon during an event at the University of Chicago that Democrats should pursue accountability for the administration to, among other goals, deter new graduates from enlisting in corrupt schemes. “I want young people coming out of school to say, ‘Should I go work for the Trump administration?’” she said. “I want them to be like, ‘Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want, and so let me avoid participating in that.’” Slotkin made these remarks last Tuesday, attracting little notice at the time because she didn’t say anything particularly noteworthy. Five days later, a tidal wave of conservative outrage suddenly crashed over her.

The Republican response has been revealing. Even Trump-skeptical conservatives are signaling that, just as they have in the past, his party will rally behind him the moment someone proposes that the laws of the country should be enforced if Trump is found to have engaged in misconduct. He has trained members of his party to sublimate any concern they may have about his actions beneath their partisan instincts. However queasy Trump might occasionally make them, they will return to his side the moment he faces the prospect of legal consequences.

[From the October 2026 issue: MAGA is making the world safe for corruption]

“It is absolutely disgraceful to threaten young Americans for participating in politics and serving their country,” Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, complained. “This type of thinking is terrible for our country,” Ari Fleischer, the former press secretary to President George W. Bush, chimed in. Columns by the Trump legal adviser Mike Davis in Fox News and the writer Miranda Devine in the New York Post depict Slotkin as a goon who was menacing bright-eyed youth for no reason other than their partisan affiliation. “Slotkin is a lowlife who’s ruining her state,” Trump said in front of the White House when prodded for a reaction by a reporter.

Trump went even further, as is his wont. “That’s a hell of a statement,” he told reporters. “Slotkin said that there should be prosecutions in order to scare people from going into politics.”

In point of fact, Slotkin didn’t say anything about prosecutions. She was discussing congressional oversight and specifically describing a scenario in which Democrats had control of Congress but not the executive branch.

She was arguing for a measured and focused approach, prioritizing only the most blatant forms of corruption.

“We do have to have accountability for the unbelievable corruption that we are living under right now,” she said. “But you can’t just make that your whole personality. So you have to pick signature cases, and you have to go after people and projects that are just super egregious.”

Later in the conversation, Herndon noted that Trump has largely insulated himself from accountability by stacking the courts and installing loyalists throughout his party and the federal government. That’s when Slotkin pointed out that exposing the administration’s corruption might deter ambitious Republicans from joining the administration during its final years.

The outraged responses omitted the first part of Slotkin’s remarks, which point out the need to investigate the administration’s pervasive misconduct. Out of context, it sounds as if Slotkin is threatening young Republicans because of malevolence. But in context, her comments are understandable, even generous. If you knew a young person who had been planning to go to work for Elizabeth Holmes, deterring them by exposing the Theranos founder as a con artist would have been doing them a favor.

Pretending that the Trump administration is innocent is just the first line of defense. The fallback argument against investigating, and perhaps eventually prosecuting, any corruption is that doing so will set off a cycle of retribution.

A Wall Street Journal editorial accuses Slotkin of “essentially promising a scorched-earth lawfare campaign” that will invite reprisals. “This is where the multiple prosecutions that Democrats unleashed against Mr. Trump in the Biden years are taking us. Mr. Trump is retaliating with similar attempts to criminalize political differences. And now Ms. Slotkin is vowing more of the same. Down this road lies more bitterness and political dysfunction,” the Journal editorial laments. Jack Goldsmith, a former Bush-administration legal adviser, makes a similar argument in a Substack column.

The fear that the two parties are locked in a cycle of retribution has a certain high-minded but superficial appeal. It’s true that Trump faced investigations after leaving office, and that he has cited these investigations as a rationale for his reign of legal terror.

But Joe Biden did not behave in a remotely similar fashion. He appointed an attorney general, Merrick Garland, who commanded bipartisan respect. Garland operated cautiously, following traditional procedure, and appointed Jack Smith as a special counsel when evidence of Trump’s refusal to cooperate with the investigation—taking classified documents, stonewalling repeated requests to return them, and then trying to mislead federal investigators—was too blatant to ignore. Trump did face one questionable prosecution: Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan prosecutor, charged that his hush money to Stormy Daniels was a campaign-finance violation. But that was not something Biden directed.

Besides, Trump’s ambition to imprison his opponents preceded anything Biden did, as anybody who remembers the “Lock her up!” chants should readily concede. Trump was unable to effectively prosecute his enemies during his first term, largely because he was stuck with a Justice Department whose staff was committed to traditional norms of independence, not for lack of trying. To the contrary, Trump spent most of his first term trying to make his attorneys general act like Roy Cohn. He pressured Ukraine’s government to gin up an investigation of Biden, and he eventually appointed a special counsel, John Durham, to investigate various enemies, only for Durham to fall on his face.

[Leo J. Wise: How corruption got this bad]

The most logical way to understand Trump’s motive is that he has always viewed laws as suggestions rather than hard requirements, and tended to assume that people in power will abuse it to protect their friends and punish their enemies. Democratic lawfare did not implant this belief in Trump. He and his allies are going to continue investigating fake crimes and committing real ones, because Trump fundamentally does not believe in the rule of law.

What is most peculiar is that the Democrats aren’t the party that has decided to elevate this question in the closing days of the midterm campaign. The Republicans are. Why, you might wonder, did a phalanx of Republicans emerge several days after the fact to start screaming about Slotkin?

Anti-anti-Trump Republicans, of which the Journal is a leading voice, often invoke the Mueller investigation and the first Trump impeachment as radicalizing events that reignited their wavering partisan attachment. The misguided Bragg indictment of Trump helped rehabilitate him among Republicans who had been ready to move on after January 6. As Davis wrote on X, “Dear @ElissaSlotkin: You are rallying fractured Republicans right before the midterms.”

Trump in his second term has operated with complete impunity. The Republican Congress is not even pretending to conduct oversight over the executive branch, and the Justice Department is not even pretending to care whether the president and his allies follow the law. The president grasps that if he ever has to face accountability, his party will back him up. Trump has two modes: flaunting his impunity and wallowing in victimization. For the moment, he finds the latter more politically useful.

Ever since Zohran Mamdani exhilarated the left with his out-of-nowhere mayoral campaign, mainstream Democrats have been dejectedly searching for an inspirational figure of their own. Where is the Democratic executive who has the media savvy to inspire his own cultlike following while making pragmatic governing decisions and ignoring the incessant demands of progressive activists?

At last, the moderates have found such a Democrat. His name is Zohran Mamdani.

Mamdani’s election, which created the theoretical prospect of 8.5 million Americans living under “the warmth of collectivism,” as he once put it, was met with understandable shock. The reality, however, has been far more mundane.

Mamdani’s campaign platform already contained several gestures to moderates. He said he would retain Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who is, to put it plainly, a billionaire Zionist cop, three things never in favor with the hard left. He also pledged to liberalize permitting to encourage more housing construction by private developers. When The New York Times asked him during the campaign, “What’s one issue in politics that you’ve changed your mind about?” Mamdani cited “the role of the private market in housing construction.”

Most important, Mamdani emphasized the importance of efficiency in city services. This might sound like an ideologically neutral goal, and it has been embraced at times by the leaders of left-wing governments—including Milwaukee’s “sewer socialists” during the early to mid-20th century. But efficiency creates tension with progressive interest groups, which generally care less about maximizing taxpayers’ bang for the buck than maintaining secure jobs and high wages for public employees.

[Joseph Heath: The populist revolt against cognitive elites]

Once elected, Mamdani retreated from some of his progressive ambitions. Among his splashiest campaign promises was “fast, free” bus service. Skeptics had questioned the wisdom of forgoing the revenue from bus fares, especially given the possibility that free buses would become mobile homeless shelters inhospitable to other New Yorkers. Mamdani still says he wants free buses, but in his initial proposal, released in concert with Governor Kathy Hochul, he quietly adopted the position of his critics, dropping the plan to eliminate fares and focusing instead on speed and reliability. He shrank another of his most ambitious proposals, universal child care for 2-year-olds, into a more gradual expansion, beginning with a modest increase of 2,000 new seats this fall and a goal of adding more in subsequent years.

During the campaign, Mamdani promised to establish an “Office of Community Safety,” which would cost $1 billion a year and task civilian workers instead of police officers with responding to mental-health emergencies. This notion was itself a compromise. As a state-assembly candidate, he’d endorsed defunding the police. As a mayoral candidate, he suggested shifting responsibilities. But as mayor, Mamdani wound up providing just over $40 million a year for this service, or 4 percent of the promised amount.

As a candidate, Mamdani said he would relinquish mayoral control of schools—a key demand of teachers’ unions, which understand that putting schools under the direction of school-board officials elected in low-turnout races gives the unions enormous leverage over education policy. He reversed that position even before he took office. Perhaps he realized that voters would hold him accountable for school performance, and that his goals would not be served by ceding authority to an interest group whose incentive is to maximize teacher pay and job security rather than to produce good outcomes for students. He has also put off a promise to reduce class sizes, which teachers’ unions care about but which is not an especially cost-effective way to promote learning gains.

Mamdani did follow through on his promise to freeze rent for about 40 percent of the city’s apartments, even though nearly any economist would say that the freeze makes housing less affordable in the long run. But this move merely followed decades of ineffective precedent. Mamdani’s most novel position on housing has been to push for a streamlined approval process to unlock more private home construction.

He has pushed Albany to raise taxes dramatically on wealthy New Yorkers, although so far he has settled for a pied-à-terre tax on second homes worth more than $5 million. And he has continued to pursue his goofy notion of opening city-run grocery stores that he believes would hold down food prices. It is difficult to see how this project could succeed, because public employees have little expertise in the complex supermarket business, and subsidizing public stores to undercut their competitors on price would both threaten small businesses and encourage black-market reselling. But Mamdani met these and other objections to his plan by scaling the public stores back to the size of a small demonstration project.

At the same time, he has made many overtures to moderates. He unveiled an initiative to combat anti-Semitism, which some pro-Palestinian activists have denounced for funding Jewish organizations that are Zionist. He also maintained the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group, which has policed terrorist threats and aggressive protest tactics by activist organizations. The DSA has called this group “specialized units used to suppress dissent” and demanded that Mamdani abolish it. Leftists have denounced all of these moves, which prioritize security for the targets of protesters at the expense of the freedom of protesters to harass their targets.

[From the August 2026 issue: The ‘consumer socialism’ trap]

More recently, he has infuriated the left by refusing to fire Tisch after ICE agents shot a New Yorker earlier this month. Instead, Mamdani praised Tisch—one of the best police commissioners in recent memory—for fighting corruption and bringing the murder rate to its lowest level in years.

Mamdani has not abandoned his antagonism toward Israel, which is the issue that animated his early career in politics and has helped endear him to the left. In his statement commemorating the October 7 massacre of Israelis, he devoted most of his attention to Palestinian victims of Israel’s counterattack. But if not everybody loves the balance he has struck, he is at least attempting to strike one. Mamdani has grasped the value, or at least the necessity, of reassuring Jewish New Yorkers of their safety, even if they disagree with him on the Middle East. This commitment has placed him at odds with the most radical elements of the Free Palestine movement, which have sought to make Zionists uncomfortable, if not outright frightened. When anti-Israel activists booed Mamdani and accused him of perpetrating genocide last week, they were responding to the fact that he is acting as a mayor for the city’s entire population, not the most fanatical elements of his base.

It’s possible that, in his heart, Mamdani would rather be leading a genuine socialist revolution than making hype videos of city workers filling potholes. But enacting socialism is notoriously harder than calling for it at a rally. It’s especially tricky to pull off in a city that faces severe fiscal constraints, whose rich denizens can easily move to nearby jurisdictions to protect their wealth, and that relies heavily on cooperation from the state legislature and the governor. A similar mismatch between ambition and authority applies to Mamdani’s vision of a post-Zionist Middle East, which lies well beyond the purview of his municipal powers.

To his credit, Mamdani has confronted quickly the hard realities that other socialist leaders have learned more painfully, trading his Marxist dream of revolutionary transformation for patient gradualism. Mamdani has adapted quickly to the limits of his office. His political talent (and core of allied social-media influencers) has enabled him to maintain his base of adoring fans even as he confines his work to humdrum municipal governance. Mamdani has discovered that socialism can succeed in New York through one simple trick: abandoning socialism.

The world will little note, nor long remember, the Katie Zacharia era. Indeed, the tenure of the second White House press secretary of Donald Trump’s second term, which ended after five days and a single, 14-minute press conference, is already receding into memory.

Yet what matters more than her press-secretarial contributions, or the ideas she stood for, is the period Zacharia represents: the Trump administration’s reversion to the hapless chaos of the president’s first term.

Trump’s initial go-round was primarily a farce, setting bumbling aides against challenges such as finding the light switches in the Cabinet room, hurling burgers against the White House wall, and booking the wrong Four Seasons. Trump cycled through personnel like Spinal Tap drummers, as one hired helper after the next left in frustration or shame.

The second term has operated with, if not normality, at least comparative efficiency. Chief of Staff Susie Wiles turned the executive branch from an exploding fireworks factory into a machine relentlessly processing the president’s whims into law.

[Read: Trump’s secret points system for Cabinet members ]

Yet as the midterm elections draw near, the machine has begun to sputter. In the span of days, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced he would livestream a public execution, only for Trump to overrule him; the administration fired Kimberly Guilfoyle, its ambassador to Greece, for engaging in corruption so overt, it embarrassed even the most corrupt administration in history; and Politico reported that Trump is asking his friends what they think of Wiles, which is historically the prelude to his turning on an underling.

In the midst of this multicar pileup, Zacharia briefly stepped forward as the administration’s stammering face.

If you have ever felt awkward in a public setting, her single press conference was the stuff of recurrent nightmares. Zacharia read from the podium, head down, in the tone of a third-grade book report delivered verbally in front of the entire school by a child with crippling anxiety. She had to pause multiple times to take gulps of air. Trump, she said in one typical segment, “had a historic one-day war, and now we are, have a booming economy, and a great relationship”—here she stopped to catch herself—“with Venezuela. The U.S. achieved record domestic oil and gas production in 2025 and record crude and petroleum product exports in 2026.”

At another point, attempting to discuss nuclear-power plants, she called them “something President Trump is delivering on, just like he delivers on every promise.” (Pause, gasp for breath.) “In addition to that, it, we will be, it, we will be, there is $54 billion tied to the Alaska LNG pipeline.”

Then she told the assembled reporters, “My goal is to be able to communicate that in complete tandem with the president, as he is his own best spokesperson, and will absolutely be leading the way as—with that.” It was as if the notion that Trump could do her job much better than she could had intruded into her thoughts and made its way out of her mouth. She wrapped up the press conference after answering only three questions.

[Tom Nichols: Kimberly Guilfoyle broke Trump’s most important rule ]

Shortly after, she appeared with the president on the White House lawn, and when a reporter asked which state’s bar exam she had passed—Zacharia has described herself as an attorney—she replied, mysteriously, “When I moved to China.”

Matters fell apart quickly. She appeared on Sean Hannity’s show, perhaps expecting the tender treatment for which Hannity is so synonymous that his last name has become a portmanteau, hannitize, for friendly damage control. Instead he subjected her to an interrogation for which she was predictably unprepared. Indeed, her defense consisted of describing herself as unprepared. “What I feel is I really stepped up to the plate with very little prep time. Given the fact that I’d been on the job less than maybe eight hours and had a briefing book in the morning, I feel like I did my very best, Sean, to deliver for the American people that day.”

Sometimes, your best just isn’t good enough. So it was with Zacharia. So it is with the whole administration—mired in a losing war and persistent inflation, and flailing about for people to blame for the debacle. People who aren’t Donald Trump.

A large majority of the Republican Party, including many officials who initially viewed Donald Trump with deep skepticism, decided early in Trump’s first term that the investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election were the hysterical product of Trump Derangement Syndrome in the Deep State and the media. There was no mystery to solve, no scandal to uncover, in Trump’s affinity for Vladimir Putin. And yet this strange alliance continues to bedevil American foreign policy.

On Friday afternoon, Trump announced that he had held another call with Putin, and came away once again depicting the Russian dictator as a cherished friend to whom he owes a great deal. “I have just concluded a highly successful discussion with President Vladimir Putin, of Russia, wherein it was agreed that Russia will immediately supply over 300,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel to the American and Global Marketplace, another 500,000 Tons during the month of November, and 1,000,000 Tons immediately thereafter,” he wrote on Truth Social.

Later that day, Trump reemphasized his debt of gratitude. “I want to thank President Putin, to be honest with you. We have massive amounts of oil coming into our country, and it’s diesel, which is what we want. So, thank you,” he told reporters outside the White House.

[Read: Why is Kash Patel planning to visit Russia?]

Many of Trump’s comments make little sense, and these were no exception. But he was using a particular kind of illogic that conflicts with his standard brand of nonsense. Trump typically depicts international trade in starkly mercantilist terms. Exports, in his mind, are a form of profit, and imports are a loss. Trump sees trade deficits as a form of theft, and conceives of a “good deal” as one in which the United States reduces its imports or increases its exports. This holds true of all goods, including oil. “We don’t need their fuel, we don’t need their energy, we don’t need their oil and gas. We don’t need anything that they have,” Trump said dismissively of Canada last year.

Yet when it comes to imports from Russia, Trump inverts his standard accounting methods. He presents Russian oil as a kind of gift, something Putin plans to “supply.” (A more accurate verb to describe this transaction would be sell.)

In reality, diesel fuel exists in a global market, and adding a small amount of Russian diesel into this enormous international supply would have a barely detectable effect upon its price. A more important effect would be on the Russian economy. Economic sanctions have hampered its ability to attract foreign currency, and the Trump-Putin plan would suspend sanctions on Russian diesel exports. Doing so would in fact appear to violate American law, which prohibits importing oil from Russia unless it makes peace with Ukraine, though illegality does not usually deter Trump.

The most immediate outcome of this plan has been to present Ukraine as the cause of economic turmoil and Russia as the innocent victim of Ukrainian warmongering. Trump almost immediately began to praise Putin and assail the Russian dictator’s adversary. Volodymyr Zelensky “could have settled this war many times—many, many times—and he chooses not to,” Trump told reporters on Friday outside the White House. “He wants to make problems for the world. He wants to make problems for our farmers, our ranchers, with diesel fuel, because Russia supplies a large portion of the diesel fuel throughout the world.” Trump’s solution? “I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal. Because they could have made many deals, and for some reason, he never does.”

There is no universally agreed-upon explanation for why Trump has remained so consistently faithful to Putin. One theory holds that Putin masterfully strokes Trump’s ego. Although Trump does respond to flattery, the flaw in this hypothesis is that other leaders have tried, and often failed, to mimic this formula. Europeans have met Trump’s second term with obsequious displays and gifts. Ukraine floated a proposal to rename the Donbas region “Donnyland.” Poland proposed christening a base “Fort Trump.” Yet these countries have remained largely frustrated.

A second theory holds that Trump simply admires dictators. This one contains a bit more truth, as seen by Trump’s swooning over Xi Jinping and even Kim Jong Un. But the dictators running Iran and Venezuela have hardly managed to duplicate the Trump-Putin partnership.

A third theory depicts Trump as merely amoral, driven by transactions and indifferent to moral concerns. Yet he has continued to defer to Putin even as the Russian dictator has undermined Trump’s own standing by aiding Iran in its war with the United States. Meanwhile, Zelensky’s assistance against Iran seems to have bought him no goodwill whatsoever. Trump’s view of the war is moralistic—he simply blames the victim rather than the aggressor. “You don’t start a war against someone 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles,” he said last year of Zelensky.

Explaining the depth of Trump’s identification with Putin may require looking at a possibility that conservatives have been dismissing out of hand for a decade: manipulation and corruption.

During the 2016 campaign, Russia dangled a lucrative deal to develop Trump-branded properties in Russia that would deliver hundreds of millions of dollars in profit with no risk. More recently, The New York Times reported that Trump advisers and Russian officials have floated deals that would enrich Trump’s inner circle as part of ending the war.

Russia has tried to bribe foreign officials, especially by handing out pieces of its resource wealth, in numerous countries. It would be strange if Putin didn’t try to replicate this tried-and-true method in the United States.

[Anne Applebaum: Trump’s message to Ukraine is now crystal clear]

Perhaps the best evidence against corruption is that Trump now has access to so many other sources of wealth that he hardly needs any financial incentive to tilt toward Russia. Yet Putin seems able to bring the American president around to his way of thinking, if not effortlessly (their most recent phone call reportedly consumed an hour and a half) then at least reliably.

There is obviously no investigation at the moment into Putin’s efforts to influence American foreign policy. Instead, incredibly, we have an investigation into the Russia investigation. The Trump administration is working to gin up criminal charges against former CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI Director James Comey, and other American officials whose crime was to explore whether something fishy was going on between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

My colleagues Jonathan Lemire and Simon Shuster report, “Some of Trump’s closest advisers have privately wondered what Putin has done to so thoroughly enthrall the president.” Perhaps instead of dismissing the people who were trying to shed light on this mystery and then attempting to throw them into prison, these advisers should be taking their concerns seriously.

About a year and a half ago, Hasan Piker, the left-wing activist and streamer, was hailed as the Democratic Party’s Joe Rogan—an influencer who can reach young men. A wave of gushy profiles paid more attention to Piker’s physique than to his habit of making impolitic comments. The New York Times’ entry in the genre was titled “A Progressive Mind in a Body Made for the ‘Manosphere.’”

Piker has since been welcomed, with notable holdouts, into the Democratic Party coalition. He has appeared with multiple Democrats on the stump, and has boasted that several others privately seek his counsel. Vanity Fair named Piker one of the 50 most influential people in America. He sees his influence as extending even to candidates who have not aligned with him publicly, pledging to pressure James Talarico to side with the left should Talarico win his Senate race in Texas. (“We have to remind him that we are the force that backed him both early on, and we are the force that allowed him to win this seat of power, and if he wants to maintain it, he’s got to play ball.”)

The predominant Democratic Party view of Piker was perhaps expressed by the Pod Save America host Jon Lovett, who told him last month on the liberal podcast, “My view is: I am part of a pro-democracy coalition in the fight against fascism, and it includes everyone from former Republicans like Nicolle Wallace and Tim Miller and Sarah Longwell, it includes establishment politicians, it includes Neera Tanden, it includes Shannon Watts, it includes AOC and Bernie, and it includes voices on the left like you.”

Piker’s stratospheric ascent—he now earns seven figures from his Twitch stream—and grandiose ambitions have made him the target of recriminations from a handful of suspicious Democratic Party moderates, as well as a recurrent villain for Fox News, which has attempted to turn him into the party’s face. Those critics have tended to recirculate a handful of Piker’s most outrageous statements, some of which—saying America deserved 9/11, and calling Orthodox Jews “inbred”—he has retracted and apologized for. Piker has complained that the mainstream media cover him but rarely deign to speak with him. Seeing that as a reasonable grievance, when he invited me on his show, I invited him to instead do an interview with The Atlantic. He accepted, before postponing the interview and then ultimately canceling it.

[Elaine Godfrey: The Hasan Piker question]

As I prepared for the interview by researching his commentary, I realized that Piker is right to complain that the handful of frequently repeated controversial statements fail to accurately represent his worldview. In fact, it’s much worse than those quotes suggest.

The most important problem with inviting Piker to join the pro-democracy coalition is that, by any reasonable definition of the term, he does not believe in democracy.

Piker declared at a debate this year, “I say we put the power back in the hands of the many rather than the power in the hands of the few. If a dictatorship is inevitable, I’d rather have it be a dictatorship of the proletariat than one that is designed around the needs of the bourgeois class.” On his Twitch stream he has said: “I love Lenin. I love Fidel Castro. And I love Che Guevara. They are genuinely fucking heroes.”

When asked to cite an example of socialism that he admires, Piker replied, “China is probably the closest,” while conceding that “there are still plenty of failures within the Chinese system.” Although he cites China’s economic model, rather than its single-party Communist regime, as the source of his admiration, other countries have exhibited the same rapid industrialization without attracting Piker’s fawning praise.

He has dismissed Mao’s campaign of mass terror as mere mistakes. “Do I believe that it was intentional? No, I don’t believe that it was intentional.” In fact, as the Brookings scholar Kenneth Lieberthal, who has taught a course on China under communism at the University of Michigan, told me, “Mao never shied away from violence among Chinese civilians to achieve his goals, and he never expressed regret for any deaths that occurred as a result of his initiatives.”

Piker has extensively praised economic development in North Korea, a country that he has acknowledged engages in repression, while maintaining that “it’s certainly not as bad as the way that Western media presents it.” In one segment marveling at economic development in the Stalinist kingdom, where even the slightest acts of dissent are met with confinement and torture, he said, “It is fucking mind-boggling to me that a country so fucking poor and so distraught, a country that withstood a fucking genocide, could get to this level, dude. Like, how does this not make you mad as an American citizen? How does this not fucking piss you off, where you look at this shit and you’re like, if they can do it, why the fuck can’t we?” Piker concluded by saying that North Korea’s achievement “shows you that a better future is possible for all of us.”

Piker does acknowledge shortcomings in the Communist regimes he defends, but treats their millions of victims as the tragic cost of progress. This contrasts with his treatment of anti-communists, which is marked by unsparing contempt. He has proclaimed his hatred for NATO on the grounds that it opposed communism: “Of course I am anti-NATO. NATO is designed with the explicit intent of being an anti-Communist institution.”

In one especially revealing episode, he attacked a refugee from Vietnam. Piker’s stream typically includes snippets of videos that he and his audience watch together, interspersed with his own commentary. As the video showed the refugee saying “We have endured suffering under the Communist regime,” he threw back his head in disbelief and began to rant: “Okay, fuck you, dude. I mean seriously, fuck you, old lady. Shut the fuck up, you stupid fucking idiotic old lady with your stupid fucking gamer headest. Who has fucked you harder, America or fuckin’ Ho Chi Minh? Suck my dick, old lady. Goddamn, dude. Fuck this refugee.”

Alongside his pro-Marxist-Leninist principles, the second pillar of Piker’s worldview is anti-Zionism. This does not distinguish him from other progressives. What does distinguish him is his belief that American Jews who do not share his position deserve punishment.

“In a totally just world, regardless of your background, any kind of fucking Zionist tendency should be treated in the same way as being a fucking rabid neo-Nazi,” he has said. Piker attracted attention when he recently predicted, “If Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone is going to come around and take action—not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.”

The two statements in combination have dire implications for American Jews. A recent poll found that, while about two-thirds of American Jews oppose the current Israeli-government policy toward the West Bank and Gaza, more than 70 percent describe themselves as very or somewhat emotionally attached to Israel. Piker’s argument that “any kind of fucking Zionist tendency”—which includes the many Zionists who strongly criticize Israeli policy—should be treated as akin to Nazism, and that American Jewish affinity with the Jewish state invites anti-Semitism, would justify subjecting Jewish Americans to ostracism and abuse.

Piker’s second and more recent comment drew predictable condemnation from several leading Democrats. Piker has depicted this response as puppetry orchestrated by the Israel lobby.

[James Kirchick: In defense of guilt by association]

“Aipac boss call was made,” he wrote on X. When Neera Tanden, the president of the liberal Center for American Progress, said that Piker was not helping the Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed to win his campaign in Michigan, Piker replied, “You should probably stop highlighting and ‘legitimizing’ reactionary framing and republican attacks against abdul from a ‘nominally liberal’ perspective but i guess your donors w financial ties to tel aviv don’t want you to stop.” The notion that any opposition to his ideas must be evidence of hidden control, exercised by wealthy Jews, is a classic anti-Semitic trope.

Some of these comments have largely been taken as confirmation that Piker is essentially a shock jock. His defenders see these rude remarks as the unavoidable cost of having a popular media personality to amplify the Democrats’ message. “Some segments of the Democratic coalition would find Piker to be edgy, or crass, or even despicable. But, if ‘Rogan of the left’ is to mean anything, it would surely mean a higher tolerance for controversy, even at the risk of alienating parts of the base,” a New Yorker profile concluded in March 2025.

But unlike Rogan, who is foremost an entertainer and who lacks grounding in any serious ideology, Piker sees his work as advancing a long-term political project.

He tends to analyze his work most openly when he gives interviews about his Twitch stream, rather than on the program itself. When he is speaking to his audience, he falls into a frat-boy patois laden with generous helpings of profanity. When he is speaking about his show, he employs more sophisticated language and concepts.

“I am, at the end of the day, someone who is engaging in—and this is a Marxist term that a lot of people get mad at, because they don’t understand that propaganda is supposed to be a neutral term in its inception—but this is agitative propaganda,” Piker told Vox last month. Agitative propaganda—or, as it is more commonly known, agitprop—is a term derived from the department of agitation and propaganda, which the Soviets created in the 1920s to instill communist thinking in workers and peasants. The method is not generally known for its faithful adherence to truth and accuracy.

Piker describes his role as the spearhead of a long-term persuasion campaign to build power through gradual means. “I want to, through a system of, at first, modest social democratic reforms, basically claw back autonomy for the everyday person and hopefully give them more of a voice in their workplace and in the political process as well, and slowly but surely, yield more egalitarian outcomes,” he told Ross Douthat a year ago.

Piker frequently derides liberalism as a failed ideology. In an interview this past spring with Trevor Noah, he explained that voters who think they’re liberal are actually suffering from false consciousness.

“They self-identify as liberals because they don’t really understand what that means. If you were to pick apart their worldview and offer them a little bit of political education, you might find that they’re actually not liberals at all. Maybe they’re socialists, maybe they’re Marxists, maybe they have a different ideological tendency than liberalism, which is basically just the monoculture that we’ve taken for granted,” he said.

He considers the Democratic Party essentially a hollow shell, its governing ideology a kind of mindless vestige to which its voters have no authentic attachment, one that he and his allies can easily replace. This strategy requires Piker and his allies to gain a foothold within the party in order to ultimately capture it. He actively campaigned for several left-wing Democrats, especially El-Sayed. “During the 10 days I spent in the Midwest ahead of the primary vote, Piker was everywhere,” my colleague Helen Lewis reported.

When El-Sayed’s Republican opponent began to tie him to some of Piker’s more infamous remarks, Piker responded pragmatically to contain the damage. He apologized for having said that America deserved 9/11, claiming that the remark was taken out of context. He dismissed comments about hating the United States: “It’s laughable to say guys like myself, guys like Abdul El-Sayed, we hate America.” (In fact, Piker has expressed this precise sentiment, or iterations of it, many, many times.)

El-Sayed responded by acting as though Piker were simply a media figure to whom he had given an interview, rather than his campaign wingman. He described Piker as “a streamer in California,” and said he would have “a conversation” with any media figure with whom he disagrees, as if campaigning with someone were just like talking on Fox News.

Piker has cooperated with this message. He has repeatedly referred to himself as “a Twitch streamer,” mocking his critics for being so small-minded as to pay any attention to his beliefs. Republicans “centering their midterm strategy around a twitch streamer no one knows was extra dumb,” he wrote on X. His go-to line in response to any important piece of news has been to mock Democrats for complaining about his influence. In response to a story about deaths in the Iran war, he posted, “will the democrats demand accountability and transparency on this issue, or will they continue crying about a twitch streamer?”

[Toluse Olorunnipa and Elaine Godfrey: What El-Sayed does next matters]

The notable thing about this rhetorical pivot is that it requires Piker to belittle himself as irrelevant and unworthy of attention. That depiction hardly comports with the seriousness with which he has previously described his influence, but it does show a level of message discipline and commitment to the cause. CNN reported last week that El-Sayed had recently spoken with Piker and “warned his rhetoric was costing El-Sayed votes, asking him to stop.”

Do not expect Piker’s reticence to continue after Election Day. There is little reason to trust his current self-presentation as a mere Twitch streamer who is too obscure to merit discussion. He sees himself as a representative voice of a movement that can take control of a major party, and then the country itself.

Describing the Democratic Party to Noah, Piker said: “That’s a weak party. That’s a party that you can seize. That’s a party that you can take advantage of.” Many earnest liberals see Piker as a handy megaphone who can convey their message to an elusive constituency. Piker, however, is not so much joining the team as sizing it up as prey.